The Theory of Knowledge—a core element of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme—is a course in epistemology and practical philosophy. By examining short texts (including but not limited to local and world issues, philosophy, history and its perspectives, and scientific research) and the knowledge issues they contain and inspire, you will gain the skills necessary to analyze knowledge claims, their underlying assumptions, and their implications.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Let us begin where we ended. For Friday, please repost the scientific snippet on which your classmate has written. Then critique, refute, reinforce, and explore both the quotation and your colleague's close reading. In the same way we did in class, identify the questions of knowledge at play, and evaluate them. Plan your writing and craft your thoughts. Be careful; be exact.

For Tuesday, I invite you (without the possibility of demurral) to
explore and share your thoughts on the IB experience thus far.Please write 600-800 words about how the IB has impacted your life.It’s early, I know, but it’s never too
early to reflect.This is a formal
piece of writing, as the structure, diction, and syntax should reflect.Be careful, be exact, be honest.Before class, please email me your
essay as an attachment, and bring a printed copy to class.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

For your first post in our consideration of Experimental Science as a way of knowing, please transcribe your quotation snippet, then provide a close reading of the text. Patiently follow your ideas to their ends, and embrace multiplicity of meaning. For Tuesday, please choose a classmate's post, and respond to her reading with your own analysis, both of the text she provides and of her close reading. Critique, refute, reinforce, explore. Only one response per Friday post, please; thus each point will have a counterpoint.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”

-Pablo Picasso

“Art renders accessible to [those] of the latest generations all the feelings experienced by their predecessors and also those felt by their best and foremost contemporaries...[Art] is a means of union...joining [people] together in the same feeling. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by those feelings and also experience them...A real work of art destroys in the consciousness of the recipient the separation between himself and the artist, and...also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.”

-Leo Tolstoy

For Friday:

In one of your other classes, find a lie that makes you realize a truth. Identify the feelings with which it infects you, and consider the nature of your knowledge. Is it subjective? Can it be both subjective and universal?

For Tuesday:

Is there a moment of universal truth described in Friday's comments with which you take issue (where you think the knower plays a subjective role)? How and why would the experience be different for you? Which of the ways of knowing come into play, and how?